Animals In The Concentration Camp Analysis

Elie, and the others at the concentration camp loses their identity as a person, due to the grueling things done to them at the camps. They stop reacting to the thousands of people dying around them: Their emotions become more and more numb as they spend more time in the cruel camps. A main part of being a human is expressing your emotions, and at the concentration camps, the soldiers try their hardest to prevent that from happening. “The thousands who had died daily at Auschwitz and at Birkenau in the crematory ovens no longer troubled [him]”, because death happens so commonly (59). After death occurs, it sparks an explosion of emotions in the human body, and the people in the camps experience it so much, it weakens their feelings. Without …show more content…
Although the beastly forces of the camp treat them as animals, they remain their human forms. However, the forces treat them like animals, so they begin to act like animals. One of the workmen throws a piece of bread into a crowd of starved bodies and they become “wild beasts of prey, with animal hatred in their eyes; an extraordinary vitality had seized them, sharpening their teeth and nails” (95). The only concept these people begin to believe in becomes their will to survive; either kill or be killed. Teeth become sharpened like savage beasts, the will to kill starts to spark in their eyes, and the vigor for food surges through their bodies. In their minds they have become animals. Before they even found a sense of animalistic behavior, the workmen treated them as animals. Right as they enter the camp, Elie and all the others lose their names and become numbers. Elie “became A-7713. After that he had no other name”, as a result of this, he surrenders a piece of his humanity that he had before going into the camps (39). They get branded like cattle, as if they exist as meat and flesh, not a living, breathing, complex human. After they get branded and have to fight for their meals, it is almost as if they embody the harsh nature that animals do. To the workmen, the dehumanized souls that work for them entertain them and put on a show. What might be someone fighting for their next meal becomes a circus act purely for the workmen’s amusement. “A crowd of workmen and curious spectators had collected along to train” to watch the horde of starving bodies fight for their meal and “the German workmen took a lively interest in this spectacle” (95). The famished herd become a zoo exhibit to the obnoxious spectators wondering who will get that piece of bread, or who will kill who. It turns into barbaric behavior by both the observers and the participants of such